Windows 7 on a Skylake MBP

[iKnowMr.Jobs]

Asking a question on behalf of a friend who does a fair bit of development work. He needs a machine that can boot between macOS, a few versions a Windows (mainly 7 & 10), and a few linux distros, natively. Obviously a MacBook Pro could run macOS well (duh), Windows 10 and better support for Ubuntu will come with time, the problem is with legacy Windows. The latest version of Bootcamp doesn't support Windows 7 installations and on top of that, Skylake CPUs will be the last generation of Intel CPUs to support Windows 7 (Kaby Lake has/will drop it). I know running Win 7 can easily be done via a virtual machine. Just wanted to know if anyone has a way of installing it natively on the machine.

 

[joshjohnson]

You can try downloading and using an older version of boot camp but you may run into hardware driver issues. Really honestly the best way to run windows 7 is to use parallels or VMware. So far, VMware has better OpenGL support and parallels has better directX support. Based on that I would say choose whichever better meets your needs for graphics APIs. They are about equal on reliability. Be sure you get 16GB of ram though. A VM can be very ram intensive and you will run out quick if you leave 10 and 7 running as you develop code.